Doing Emotions History

Susan J. Matt

Publication Year: 2013

How do emotions change over time? When is hate honorable? What happens when love is translated into different languages? Such questions are now being addressed by historians who trace how emotions have been expressed and understood in different cultures throughout history. Doing Emotions History explores the history of feelings such as love, joy, grief, nostalgia as well as a wide range of others, bringing together the latest and most innovative scholarship on the history of the emotions. Spanning the globe from Asia and Europe to North America, the book provides a crucial overview of this emerging discipline. An international group of scholars reviews the field's current status and variations, addresses many of its central debates, provides models and methods, and proposes an array of possibilities for future research. Emphasizing the field's intersections with anthropology, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, data-mining, and popular culture, this groundbreaking volume demonstrates the affecting potential of doing emotions history.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright

Contents

Introduction

Why did early modern Europeans believe the world to be a vale of tears? In contrast, how and when did Americans come to be so cheerful? Why did homicidal husbands in the eighteenth century kill their wives out of anger, while husbands in the nineteenth were more likely to claim they murdered out of jealousy? How did Americans learn to manage their anger to increase productivity and ...

Part I: Basic Issues: Assessing Change

Chapter 1. Modern Patterns in Emotions History

After thirty to forty years of serious, informative work on emotions history, scholars have not clearly answered what would seem a vital and timely question: do emotions and emotional standards change when a society moves toward modernity? This essay seeks to explore the current status of the issue, to indicate promising lines for renewed attention, and to urge greater priority for ...

Chapter 2. Recovering the Invisible Methods for the Historical Study of the Emotions

From the very beginning, those who have studied the history of the emotions
have realized the difficulties they faced. In 1941, Lucien Febvre, the first scholar
to call for such investigations, wrote that the undertaking would be fraught
with challenges. He observed, “Any attempt to reconstitute the emotional life
of a given period is a task that is at one and the same time extremely attractive...

Part II: Regional Analysis

Chapter 3. The Skein of Chinese Emotions History

It would be impossible to begin a chapter on the history of emotions in China
without at least making glancing reference to the stereotype of “the emotionless
Chinese.” This shibboleth is of uncomfortably long lineage. It began, most
likely, with the coming of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries to China,
men and women who, shocked at the seeming impassivity of the Chinese they ...

Chapter 4: Emotions History in Eastern Europe

It would be unwise, even harmful, to approach a regional history of emotions
looking for essential patterns of national or ethnic character. To be sure, many
people have claimed defining emotional traits for their own culture. In the
early 1900s, for example, it was common for Russians to speak of a “Russian
soul” naturally inclined toward “brooding and melancholy.”1 More deleterious...

Part III: Probing Specific Emotions

Chapter 5. Finding Joy in the History of Emotions

Are historians of emotions a negative lot? Do they give greater weight to angst
and animosity, sadness and fear than they do to the positive human emotions?
Indeed, might the field of the history of emotions as a whole suffer from something
of a “negative bias,” a tendency to accord greater prominence to the role
played by negative emotions in constituting the human past? Consider the titles...

Chapter 6. Advertising for Love: Matrimonial Advertisements and Public Courtship

In June 1864, a man signing himself “Bertram” printed a remarkable matrimonial
advertisement. At forty-three lines long and three hundred and seventy-two
words (but only three sentences), it took up nearly a quarter of a column in
the New York Times. Describing himself as a “young gentleman in all respects ...

Part IV. Emotions in Society

Chapter 7. Religion and Emotions

The practice of emotions history in the field of religious studies has developed
apace with the flowering of scholarly interest in everyday practice, embodiment,
locality, and the constructed self over the past several decades. Most
previous religious history from the earlier twentieth century,1 whether focused...

Chapter 8. Emotion and Political Change

From Henry St. John, Lord Bolingbroke, to Jürgen Habermas, social theorists
have long argued that political transformations rest on a foundation of reasoned
public critiques. Habermas contended that widespread public debate
about—and criticism of—official government policies first developed in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries through a process of rational disputation ...

Chapter 9. Media, Messages, and Emotions

Communication media inevitably raise questions about emotion. In Plato’s
Phaedrus, Socrates worries about the emotional effects of writing—the new
medium of his time. Talking with Phaedrus, a young man who brings a written
speech to him, Socrates expresses concern for the “frenzied enthusiasm” he believes
it is likely to produce in those who read it. Among the faults that Socrates...

Afterword

The momentum for research in the history of emotions is truly impressive,
after the somewhat tentative launch of the field several decades back. Major
centers in the United Kingdom, Australia, and Germany as well as periodic
conferences in many other countries demonstrate the growing institutional
interest in emotions history. Individual scholars and writers contribute...

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